Chinese vendor ZTE, for example, acquired in June a worldwide patent license for Dolby’s portfolio covering High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE AAC), an international standard used and licensed from Dolby by a number of mobile vendors. SingTel said in January it will use Dolby Digital Plus technology to deliver cinema-quality surround sound on Mio TV, its IPTV platform.

Dolby was born in Portland, Oregon in 1933, and his family eventually moved to the San Francisco Peninsula. From 1949 to 1957 he worked at Ampex, including on the electronics of videotape recording systems. In 1957, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University and in 1961, he was awarded a doctorate in physics from Cambridge in 1961.

The audio pioneer won medals from the Audio Engineering Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers among other honors.

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